Eat Street Social, Rye Delicatessen & Bar, Pig & Fiddle and more

Readers: Win Heavy Table pint glasses

The Tap loves restaurant tips from readers, so we’re awarding a Heavy Table pint glass to the best tipster each month. The Tap is the metro area’s comprehensive restaurant buzz roundup, so if you see a new or newly shuttered restaurant, or anything that’s “coming soon,” email Tap editor Jason Walker at jason@heavytable.com.

October’s winner: Kari Anderson of Minneapolis

Eat Street Social (opens this fall)

14 W 26th St, Minneapolis

Northeast Social owners Joe Wagner and Sam Bonin are coming to Nicollet Avenue this fall with Eat Street Social, a new bar and restaurant in the former Tacos Morelos space that hopes to replicate the laid-back yet elegant vibe and quality food, wine, and beer of their first restaurant.

Eat Street Social will also have liquor, and Nick Kosevich and Ira Koplowitz of Bittercube bitters are leading the cocktail program. Kosevich is well-known locally as the former bartending force at the Town Talk Diner, and Koplowitz cut his teeth at Chicago cocktail den Violet Hour. These guys live to make unique, delicious cocktails, and their hiring means Wagner and Bonin are serious about giving Eat Street Social a bar that means business.

“I’d say [Kosevich] is right up there, one or two with the top bartenders in town,” Wagner said. “And so we’ll be making our own tonics, of course we’ll be using Bittercube bitters. Most of the big stuff for the cocktails will be made in-house.

“The bar that we designed is going to be really neat. We’re using a sushi cooler for a lot of the ingredients to stay fresh. Kind of like food, you want to use the freshest ingredients. So it will be a display area where you can really watch the whole process.”

Geoff Little will be executive chef at both locations and design the menu at Eat Street, so the food will stick close to what Northeast Social already does: an approachable yet thoughtful array of well-crafted small plates, salads, sandwiches, and entrees. But Eat Street will be different in ways other than the cocktails, as the larger dining room will seat around 100 and there will be live music a few nights a week, as well as a banquet space (formerly Azia’s Caterpillar Room). It will also have an old-fashioned soda fountain, with housemade syrups and old-school soft drinks like raspberry sodas, tonics, and egg creams.

Becca Dilley / Heavy Table

“We can’t wait for it to open because we have a lot to show,” Kosevich (above) said. “I haven’t made drinks in this city for over two years. Since I left Minneapolis, since I left the Town Talk, we basically have been working Bittercube and designing cocktails all over the Midwest. So this is really the first time that we get to showcase that work, the culmination of two years of hard work, here in Minneapolis.”

Kosevich and Koplowitz, who essentially have been given free rein to create their menu, have some strong opinions about what makes for tasty, interesting liquor. One conversation with these guys, and you know the bar at Eat Street Social is not going to be typical.

“Most back bars you go in and it’s all kind of things that everyone knows and everyone’s heard of, some big factory distilleries,” Koplowitz said. “One thing that we’re really excited about with this project is to have a nice, broad spirits list with … a lot of things that are a little more esoteric and unique than the Johnnie Walkers of the world.”

“People are going to order something, and we may not have it,” Kosevich said, “because we’re showcasing something more unique that’s similar, comparable, or contrasting, but through the in-depth education aspect of our spirit program [bartenders] will be able to direct people in the right way, in the right direction that they want to go. Guests leave in a more positive way when they’ve been given something new, something fresh.”

“One classic example would be rather than having Jack Daniels, have George Dickel, which is another Tennessee whiskey that is really nice,” Koplowitz said. “It’s not craft, it’s still a really big company, but showcasing something that’s been around a long time and has been somewhat forgotten.”

But it’s not all about drinks. Wagner said he and Bonin’s goal for Eat Street Social was to create a place for real drinks, yes, but also solid food and cool vibes for the creative, funky Whittier neighborhood. The two moved to the neighborhood from Rochester together when they were 18 and never lost their love for the area.

“With MCAD being over there, there’s a lot of creative young people that gives a lot of energy to it,” Wagner said. “There’s a lot of fantastic food on Eat Street. We’ll bring kind of a new feeling and operate something that isn’t really in that area right now.

“There’s no real bars in that neighborhood. I mean, Uptown, even, there’s nothing really. The Uptown Bar was cool back in the day, but it’s gone. There’s no real bars to kind of replace it.”

Lowry Hill is getting a huge jolt of all-day food and cocktails. First came The Lowry and now it’s Rye Delicatessen & Bar, set to open in the former Auriga space on Hennepin.

Rye is open for breakfast all the way into late night, serving “Jewish and East European-style foods modernized for contemporary tastes.” The deli will cure and smoke its own meat, have a bakery, and it will include traditional deli favorites like knishes, rugelach, and black-and-white cookies.

The bar will have cocktails, alongside wine and beer, a deli case, and a small grocery section of imported dry and canned goods. According to a news release, Rye “is a place where guests can pick up coffee and a bagel on the way to work, linger over a cappuccino and a chocolate babka during the day, grab a quick bite with friends after a movie, or stop in for dinner with the whole family.”

“A good, fun, casual deli is something both the neighborhood and city as a whole could really use,” owner David Weinstein said.

Weinstein said Rye would open the week of Nov. 14.

Pig & Fiddle (now open)

3808 W 50th St, Minneapolis | 952.955.8385

Pig & Fiddle has opened in the Fulton neighborhood of Minneapolis near 50th and France, serving a menu co-owner Mark van Wie has called “rustic” alongside 36 beer taps. The sister to St. Paul’s Muddy Pig will likely fare well in the district, which teems with popular restaurants.

An interesting side note to the menu and all those taps, though, is the interior. Pig & Fiddle occupies half of what was Pearson’s Edina Restaurant, known for its huge stone fireplaces and sea of wood paneling. Upon learning of Pearson’s closure, many who had been there likely wondered about the fate of those fireplaces, my always-chilly wife among them.

Good news for her: That interior has largely remained, including one of the fireplaces, and there’s still a lot of wood, yet Pig & Fiddle has created a modern vibe within the space. It’s a nice job — and probably good for business, because there were many who lamented Pearsons’ closing.

“A big part of the appeal of the space was the warmth of the room,” co-owner Mark van Wie said. “Given that we had to add two restrooms, a bar and an entryway, I think we were able to preserve a lot of the good stuff and even update it a bit. It would have been cheaper to gut the place, but you have to make compromises.”

The Tap is The Heavy Table’s guide to area restaurant openings, closings, and other major events. The Tap is compiled by Heavy Table writer Jason Walker, and will be published biweekly. If you already subscribe to our newsletter, look for an emailed version of The Tap every other week — otherwise, you can find it on the website on alternating Tuesdays.

If you’ve got tips for The Tap, please email Jason Walker at jason@heavytable.com. The Tap’s Twitter feed has moved to@heavytable.

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About the Author

Jason Walker

Jason Walker was born and raised in Kansas, where he grew up loving his grandmother’s homemade noodles and weekly fried fish. A summer internship in Milwaukee turned Jason and his wife, Leita, into die-hard fans of the Northwoods culture, and they moved to Minneapolis in 2006. Immediately the quality of food and drink in the Twin Cities was impressive – that even the most unassuming bar usually had a decent menu – and Jason knew he was home. Now living in the Fulton neighborhood with two kids, Jason grows tomatoes, cans voraciously, and badgers his neighbors with conversations about restaurants.